Storm Is Coming to the MCU, So It’s Time for Marvel to Remember What Makes Her Great

The X-Men have finally made their way to the MCU, with Marvel Studios pulling out all the stops to make sure they’re just as successful as the Avengers had been once upon a time. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness began the process, with Deadpool/Wolverine and Spider-Man: Brand New Day showing just how ready everyone is for Marvel’s merry mutants on the big screen, helping buoy the struggling film franchise. Numerous members of the cast of the film and the release date have been announced, and now we get to the favorite sport of Marvel fans – talking about where the various characters are going to go, who is going to be the breakout star, and the various stories that could be adapted for the films.

One character that numerous fans can’t wait to see on the big screen is one of the greatest X-Men of them all, a former leader of the team who has often been a favorite of the creators working on the group – Storm. Ororo Munroe is one of Marvel’s most beloved characters and it’s not even close. Over Chris Claremont’s landmark first X-Men run, Storm was built into one of the co-stars of Uncanny X-Men (along with Wolverine; search your feelings, Cyclops fans, you know it to be true) and would stay one of the most popular superheroes of all time, appearing in every major adaptation of the X-Men. However, there was a massive change to the character in the 21st century, one that the MCU can’t ignore, that has split her fandom. I’m speaking of the marriage between her and Black Panther. While it has its pros, it’s led us in some bad directions and the MCU needs to stay away from it.

Storm’s Marriage With Black Panther Took Her Down a Bad Path

So, let’s start at the beginning. In the ’00s, Marvel was experimenting with starting making their own movies again and Black Panther was among the films that was being planned at the time. T’Challa had started something of a second renaissance during the late ’90s, thanks to the Marvel Knights line, and had returned to Avengers for the first time in years. However, he couldn’t really sustain his success, with Black Panther getting cancelled and Panther being dropped from the cast of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Marvel needed to make the character look big for potential investors and production companies, leading to a new Black Panther series from Reginald Hudlin and John Romita Jr. However, that was only the beginning.

Around this time, it was decided that the best way to make Black Panther popular was to weld him to an already popular character and Storm was chosen for the simplest of reasons – they were both African. A whole relationship was retconned into existence in Storm (Vol. 2) and the two would get married around the time Civil War was destroying the Marvel superhero community. After that book ended, they were shunted over to Fantastic Four with issue #544, with legendary creator Dwayne McDuffie writing their adventures. Those issues of Fantastic Four were the height of their marriage, McDuffie doing a fantastic job of actually selling their relationship.

However, just about everything after that wasn’t great. The problem was simple – Storm was an A-list character who fans wanted to see in lots of books and, at the time at least, Black Panther wasn’t. Their entire marriage was built to grab headlines (you can go back and read interviews from the time where Marvel admits this) and the only creators who could make it work were those on McDuffie’s level; after his tragic demise, no other creator was able to make their relationship feel like an actual relationship. Storm was subtracted from the X-Men during the Decimation and Utopia Eras of the team; while she would sometimes show up and help out, she was busy being queen while the mutant race was at its lowest ebb (although she did end up as part of the cast of Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3) during Warren Ellis’s ten issues on the book). Being married to T’Challa damaged Storm and the X-Men.

As time went on, Black Panther became the bigger of the two characters. Storm lost a lot of her popularity during this period and it’s led the character in some unfortunate directions. Her relationship with Wolverine never really felt right, like seeing siblings kiss, after which she spent years leading the X-Men during their worst period. The early Krakoa Era was going to make her pregnant with T’Challa’s child, but that was avoided and she was instead made into a leader of Arakko, which worked so well because it was the first time we’d seen the real Storm since her time with T’Challa. Since then, it’s been all about the power scaling, making her more and more powerful at the cost of her personality.

Marrying Black Panther basically leached Storm of what made her so interesting to readers. Fans stopped paying attention to her and it’s led Marvel to try to shock readers into getting back into her. Her most recent round of power-scaling shows that they’ve basically stopped trying to make her an interesting character, instead falling back on her powers and spectacle to make her interesting. It’s a sad state of affairs for the character, all because years ago someone decided that she could make Black Panther popular.

An MCU Marriage Between Ororo and T’Challa Would Be Stormy for Both of Them

I think that there’s something to the marriage of Storm and Black Panther that grabs some fans. It’s one of those marriages that seems to work – two regal, beautiful people coming together to love each other and fight evil – in theory but just didn’t really prove to be all that interesting. Things may have been different if McDuffie, the person who first said they should be together, had gotten to work on them longer, but his tragic death ended any hope of that. Their marriage made Black Panther popular again, but it did so at the cost of Storm’s personality.

Storm in the comics has been pushed to the moon lately, but her fans aren’t happy with the direction that she’s been taken. All of that began with her marriage to Black Panther. It took a character who had long been a star in her own right and made her into something different. While this can work rather well at times, Storm was never meant to be a co-star. Marvel has tried everything to bring her back to where she was, but they’ve lost their way with her, and the MCU needs to not be comic accurate this one time.

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